For another part of that extra year during university, I rode my ’85 Honda Nighthawk S (mine was red) across the US, from New Hampshire to Seattle, in the Spring of 1995. If you love America, especially it’s national parks, as I do, seeing the US on motorcycle is unforgettable. Highly recommended.

My favorite place in the world is in Hawaii. It is the summit of MaunaKea. If you have a chance to visit Hawaii, and not Oahu, but the Big Island, I highly recommend that you consider taking a guided tour of Mauna Kea or renting a 4×4 and driving there yourself, or if you are really hardcore, hike up Mauna Loa from Volcanos National Park. Measured from the base of the sea floor,Mauna Kea and MaunaLoa are the tallest mountains in the world. Mauna Kea is also the site of many major observatories including the Keck and Subaru. (Fun Mozilla facts: the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan hosts a Mozilla mirror site, and Atsushi Shimono, Mozilla community member, spends a good chunk of time each year at the Subaru observatory.)
Note, if you plan on driving yourself, be sure to rent a 4X4 from Harpers, because the other rental car companies won’t insure you on the Saddle Road. Also, be sure to take time (at least an hour, ideally more) to acclimatize at the Onizuka Center (named after Japanese-American astronaut Ellison Onizuka who was lost on the Challenger), because going from sea level to 13,000+ feet in a few hours will kill you if you’re not careful.
The summit can be a dangerous place, (weather changing all of a sudden, lack of oxygen due to high altitude makes you do things you would not otherwise do, etc.) but the views from the top of the world are amazing. It is the clearest place on the Planet Earth to view the night sky and if you can be there at night, near or on the new moon when there is little or no moonlight, you will see more stars than any other place on the globe. I consider it a ‘must-go’ place before you die.

I was in a New York Times article on the growing popularity of station wagons in 2002: DRIVING; An S.U.V.? Oh, That’s So Over!. The paper version had a photograph of me and my car (not available online afaik) which took up most of the page. I still think wagons are great and almost always better than SUVs.

My photo of jellyfish from the Monterey Bay Acquarium was one of the default images at Flickr.com for many many months. It has over 373,000 views.
Another photo of mine that is quite popular, and timely this winter, is my photo of snowmen from Hokkaido.

I wrote a blog post that was heavily read about the monoculture of Internet Explorer in South Korea.
In closing, because the Mozilla community has grown significantly and some may not have combed through my blog archives (ha!) I’ll take this moment to link to ‘The Cost of Monoculture‘ which was a blog post I did after realizing that South Korea does not use SSL for encryption on the web and that South Koreans transacting online in South Korea are required to use Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Internet Explorer for their transactions. It was widely referenced across the web, hit the top page of Digg, Boing Boing, TechMeme, Slashdot, and was the first real explanation in English of the daily reality for everyone who uses the web in South Korea.
In light of the very recent European Union ‘statement of objection’ regarding the bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows, the example of South Korea is more important than ever to show how technical decisions can create defacto monpolies. Also in light of the EU objection, the decision of Google to support Active-X in Chrome is concerning.
I hope to have more news about South Korea and the defacto monopoly of Internet Explorer in February.

Mozilla’s fearless leader, John Lilly, is profiled (with his NSID beard) in the LA Times in both the Business and Technology sections.

The Stanford University-trained computer scientist is chief executive of Mozilla, maker of the Firefox Web browser, which broke Microsoft’s hold on the market so it couldn’t dominate the Internet the way it does computer operating systems. About 95% of Web surfers used Microsoft’s Internet Explorer in 2004; now 20% use Firefox, and other companies are offering browsers that are smarter and faster than ever before.

“I spend more time in my browser than I do in my car. You should spend at least as much time choosing which browser you use as which car you drive. It’s your lens onto the Web. Just like the lenses in your glasses, it affects the way the Web looks to you. As we see more and more of the world through the Web, the characteristics of the lens matter more than ever.”